


requiems

by jemmasimmns (laurellance)



Series: jemma simmons cronicles [6]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-22 04:16:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8272457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurellance/pseuds/jemmasimmns
Summary: Jemma Simmons and Science. (Their evolving relationship)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fitzsimmonsy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzsimmonsy/gifts).



_My Loyalties are to Science._

Sometimes she can imagine herself saying those words, young and naive and innocent, and she wants to laugh, because sometimes she’s not sure that’s true anymore, but she follows along regardless. 

* * *

 

Science is cold hard facts, finding a reason that can be proven. It is answering the question _Why_   with definite reasons, rational thought, and no emotion. It is coming into the lab, day after day, and sometimes, Jemma finds herself looking at results in horror.

Maybe horror wasn’t quite right. HYDRA had raised her standards of what was defined as awful, because she knows that she doesn’t react as much now. She takes it, blinks, processes it, and moves on. It's more of a vague sense of shock she didn't quite think possible, because she's seen _It_ , she's been on Maveth for six months, and has seen horrors she's never going to forget. 

It's not science that inspires her, but it's herself. 

* * *

 

Sometimes, during the nights when she just can't sleep, when there are days where things are just too bright and she can't handle them, she'll finish the day and leave. No extra hours, as she says goodbye to the director. 

She's become quite adept at lying. She doesn't know when, but she does remember Agent Triplett telling her she's not a good liar, and she can't pinpoint when that had happened. So when they ask questions about Quake and Bobbi and Antoine Triplett, she keeps a straight face, and gives a professional answer, the kind that they expect. 

She doesn't tell them the small things, the small habits that made them so memorable, because she has heard brave and honourable and honest and kind so many times they all seem to blur together, and there is nothing she can do more for the deceased than remember them as they were when they were alive. 

So she'll remember them, in their glory and their fall, at sometime early in the morning because she cannot sleep properly, not anymore. Not without nightmares, insomnia, or some other memory that chooses to unearth itself for her to remember again. 

Some nights, she does get rest. It’s peaceful, and she clings onto those moments fiercely, because it has been so long since she can remember being at peace, and it feels strange. Optimistic, odd. 

* * *

 

Science is a livelihood of hers. Something she has turned into a career, something is very skilled at. This she knows well, like the back of her hand, and the veins and arteries and the layers of muscle and nerves. 

She had joined SHIELD to answer her questions, and it had been a long way since she has been seventeen. Close to a decade now, and her experiences are everything seventeen year old her never would have expected.

Science doesn't teach her how to to pick herself back up death after death, it doesn’t teach her the will to survive on an alien planet for six months. It doesn’t teach her to cry, but cry she does. 

In the end, she’s the one who saves herself.

* * *

 

She picks herself up after heartbreak, goodbyes, and tragedies, and loss, lots of loss. It’s memories of people she knew, of ghosts she can’t forget, the people she has loved and will continue to love. It’s going back to science, changed, because science isn’t everything, and it will not be her everything. 

She has a life, she has something to hold on, people to listen, a job, something that’s developed and changed and has become something that is hers. 

It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s hers. She’s survived Maveth, and probably will never have her sleeping schedule back, but has developed a craving to see the single sun. She hates the colour blue now, blue and sand and pain and loss, _It_ killing people like sacrifices, and she’s lived past it. 

* * *

She has two defining memories she remembers so damned well: HYDRA, and Maveth, the two places she hates. She doesn't hate science, but the things done with it sometimes leave much to be desired. The use is important, regardless of intent. And someone dies for her, to keep her cover, and she’s not sure where he is, but he’s gone. (She wants to tell him thank you, thank you, but she knows it’s talking to the dead.)

She buries loved ones, Lincoln and Trip and Will, people who she adores dearly, and will continue to adore dearly. They’re gone, buried, and she does not have bodies to go to, not the proper kind, but there are graves.

(She tells them stories now, when she finds the time. It’s talking to old friends, but she sometimes hopes they’ll answer back, not because she is religious, no she’s far from that, but because hope is both kind and devastating and maybe, she will be proven wrong, and they will be living.)

* * *

 

"I was a 17-year-old girl with two PhDs and a million questions."

And she isn’t one any longer, and she never will be one, but she’s grown, and she’s developed, and it’s not an easy path, but it’s hers.

* * *

 

(Bonus: the bloody cosmos don’t owe us anything.)

**Author's Note:**

> Finished up a old work of mine, so. Yeah.
> 
> tumblr @paedfoot


End file.
